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White: Jake Scott's heroics change many lives

updated Saturday, November 12, 2011 - 3:16pm

Jake Scott has been many things to many people.

He is forever a Super Bowl MVP to the Miami Dolphins faithful and an All-American defensive back to Georgia fans.

According to many accounts, he was brutally honest and free-wheeling as a young man and not afraid of confrontations. Those who have sought him out have found him deeply reclusive in his retirement, and his introduction at today’s Georgia-Auburn game to celebrate his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame marks a rare public appearance.

To Athens native John Traylor, Scott is a life-saver — a man whose legacy is still dangling from a tree over a stream in North Georgia and whose quick thinking and brute strength saved Traylor from floating over a waterfall and to his death in 1962.

Before Traylor tells the story, he prefaces it with a warning. It’s a big, fantastic tale, and even his wife didn’t fully believe it until they bumped into someone who also was on the camping trip nearly 50 years ago and recounted the story.

But it’s about the Jake Scott he knows and the details are exactly how he remembers them.

Traylor was a 14-year-old junior counselor at the YMCA in 1962. Scott, his elder by two years, was a senior counselor and second in command behind the camp director and eventual namesake of the YMCA, Cobern Kelley. Kelley led a group of about 40 campers, among them five or six junior counselors and Scott, on a hike through Tallulah Gorge State Park, where recent rains had turned an otherwise shallow stream into what Traylor said was more akin to a turbulent river.

“The director said, ‘Boys, stay away from the water because it’s dangerous,’ ” Traylor said. “There had been a lot of rain, and it was just dangerous water to be around, so he wanted us to stay away.

“But there’s always one.”

It didn’t take long for a camper to wander too close to the water. He slipped on wet rock and fell into the stream, which rapidly carried him in the direction of a waterfall just a few hundred yards downstream. Being a strong swimmer, Traylor thought nothing of plucking off his boots and jumping in the water to save the camper. He caught up with the struggling swimmer quickly, but getting him out of the water turned out to be far more difficult than he had imagined.

“I just kept trying to push this kid up to where he was high enough to grab something, and after two or three attempts, I got under him as best I could and just kind of pushed him up high enough to where he was able to get a dry rock,” Traylor said. “But with me pushing him, it threw me backward into the main current again, and I was just too tired to fight it at that point. All I had the energy to do was get my head up and get a breath.”

At this point, Traylor estimates he was less than 150 yards from the waterfall, which he said was “big enough that if you go over it, you’re going to die.” Seeing this, Scott sprang into action. He sprinted along the bank and, without hesitation, climbed a tree that leaned out over the water. The tree was hardly wider at its base than a person’s leg, Traylor said, and it dangled Scott only a few feet above the water. It was just close enough that Traylor could grab on to one of Scott’s legs as he passed underneath, and for a brief moment Traylor, Scott and part of the tree all sagged into the stream. But as Traylor hung on tightly to his lifeline, Scott climbed hand over hand back along the tree and onto the bank.

“Jake didn’t seem to even think much of it when it was over,” Traylor said. “And me being the age I was, maybe I didn’t think about it much, either.”

The two bumped into each other occasionally on campus at Georgia, where they were both students, and Scott was always cordial, Traylor said. Scott left Georgia for the Canadian Football League after his junior season in 1968, and later went on to play in the NFL, most notably as a two-time Super Bowl champion and the MVP of Super Bowl VII with the Dolphins. Traylor graduated from the University of Georgia, eventually joined the Air Force Reserve, and is now retired.

About a year ago, Traylor managed to track down through a mutual friend a phone number for Scott, to whom he told the story.

Scott, to Traylor's astonishment, did not remember any of it.

“He said to me, ‘I can’t say that I do remember it because there are a lot of things I don’t remember because I’ve been hit in the head so many times,’ ” Traylor said. “But I told him that story again and that there are a lot of people who wouldn’t be alive today if he didn’t come to my rescue.”

There’s Traylor’s daughter, for one. Then there are the two teenage girls he saved from drowning in an undertow along an isolated spot near Panama City Beach, Fla, and two others Traylor has pulled from the water.

“I’m sure some of those people were married and some have grandkids now,” Traylor said. “Think of all the lives Jake Scott saved that wouldn’t otherwise be here.”

That’s the punchline to Traylor’s tale. It’s not his own brush with death, and it’s not that he knew a boy who went on to become a college and professional football star. It’s that Jake Scott’s heroics are responsible for, by Traylor’s count, at least six lives.

So whatever Jake Scott was to you before, Traylor said, he is also a hero.

“I recently told that story to someone who said he always thought Jake was a kind of wild guy who did as he pleased and lived on the edge of right and wrong,” Traylor said. “He said he was glad there was more to him than what he had always heard. That’s why I tell people the story now.”

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